Dear Bob ... I am the senior project manager for a mid-sized company. Our IT director retired recently and it has now become clear that he held many of our initiatives together by providing detailed instructions and assistance to several of the key staff members to whom he was somewhat of a "father figure" and regular mentor. This was never obvious to me, even though many of those people were working on my proj Dear Bob …I am the senior project manager for a mid-sized company. Our IT director retired recently and it has now become clear that he held many of our initiatives together by providing detailed instructions and assistance to several of the key staff members to whom he was somewhat of a “father figure” and regular mentor. This was never obvious to me, even though many of those people were working on my projects.The director who stepped into his place has a very different mindset. He has reorganized our department into workgroups and defined processes for us all to follow in working together. I agree with his approach, because the growth of our company will demand a much more scalable operating model than we had before. Unfortunately, he has defined our processes in a way that is making it very difficult to get creative about doing things. He spends much of his time working remotely, so keeping him in the loop depends on our accurately documenting and managing even the smallest of tasks through an electronic calendar/task manager that he monitors to determine our performance. He has stated that he wants us to minimize active communication with him outside of the “normal process.”He has been somewhat receptive to my concern about having a staff who are insufficiently skilled to do their jobs without regular assistance, but has also made it clear that he has no budget to hire more capable individuals in their place.This has created two problems for me: 1) I am forced to micromanage and direct many of my key employees. This was outside of the scope of my work when I defined my projects, and is causing me to lose significant amounts of time. It was never clear to me how much assistance my project team members were requiring on a daily basis.2) I am finding myself caught up in endless electronic documentation of task-level work, to satisfy my new director’s desire to monitor progress remotely and in real-time.The bottom line is I’m finding myself micromanaged, and am forced into micromanaging and regularly assisting people if I want to get things done. Both are roles I find particularly frustrating. Lately, my frustration has come to the point of boiling over. I suspect that the solution is to leave this company and find a better working environment. However, I want to do this right, and know that finding the RIGHT employer and position could take a while. In the meantime, any suggestions for surviving without giving myself a stroke or killing one of my co-workers?– Desperately avoiding sharp objects.Dear Desperate … From one extreme to the other, eh?Some business leaders think organically. They focus on working through relationships, personal interactions, and a lot of exchange of context and ideas. Employees working for this kind of leader tend to succeed through ingenuity, hard work and extensive back-and-forth problem-solving discussions.Other business leaders think mechanistically. The see an organization as a collection of motors, gears, levers and buttons. If you connect them properly, they’ll turn and move in such a way that the right result emerges as inevitably as night follows day. Few managers are really as extreme as either description would suggest – they’re somewhere in the middle, striking a balance between relational and process-based approaches to getting work done. And that’s a good place to be.My guess is that your current manager read one or two too many process books, and actually believes that stuff. You aren’t going to change his mind, either, and so long as you’re working for him, your job is to help him turn his thought process into as good a reality as you can. It isn’t that he’s right – it’s that right or wrong, decisions do have to get made and once they’ve been made the time for questioning them is past. If there never was a time for questioning them before they were made, that’s too bad, but it doesn’t change anything.Here’s the good news about the bad news: You can learn something. Trying to implement an operation based on a strong process model is an excellent experience to have in your background. So assume it can work, and do whatever you can to figure out how to make it work. Then, when you’re in a role that lets you decide where the right balance lies, you’ll be in a better position to choose the right spot on the continuum.– Bob ——– Technology Industry